Usually children are employed as shepherds or to take care of younger children, in the cities, they are employed most often as the domestic help, mechanics, carpet weavers, and waste collectors, cleaners in restaurants, beedi makers and in cracker factories. Child workers work in terrible conditions.
In international labor organization has said that India has the largest number of the full time child workers with their age ranging between five and fourteen years. Many of them or working in hazardous occupations. According to a recent report of the United Nations children’s fund [UNICEF], India has about 11 crore of child laborers of whom, 2.5 crore work in Maharashtra alone.
Children, who used to learn their trade from their parents, now go to work in industries. The factory replaces the home. Children are employed since they need to be paid very little and they do not protest against hard work. That’s how child labor took root.
The reason for child labor being so prevalent in our society lie in certain factors: poverty, youth unemployment, low income, illiteracy, low standard of living and social backwardness are the major ones among them. Any child who does not go to school is a child laborer, according to Shantha Sinha, a Magsaysay Award winning social worker of the Mamidipudi Venkatarangaiah Trust that works to rehabilitate child workers. According to the child labor (prohibitiob0 act, all persons below the age of fourteen are children. They have the right to education.
The malaise of child labor is not uniformly spread in the country. In India, where literacy is high, child labor has come down. But in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, where the literacy figure is high, child labor is high too. In Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, illiteracy is high as is child labor.
Normally child laborers are of four types.
1. Domestic workers 2. Are bonded labors. 3. Wage laborers and 4 .other non economic workers.
Bonded laborers work under landlords as their parents have taken loans from them. They are found mostly in agriculture, brick-making and other such jobs where they form a majority. Most of them are from the scheduled castes and tribes.
It is estimated that there are about 5.5 crore children in our country engaged in agriculture, mines, brick kilns, constriction, fishing, carpet-weaving, fire works, match factories, glass-cutting, beedi-making, diamond –cutting and polishing, electroplating, dyeing, washing clothes, as domestic helps and in such other jobs. About 20% of these children work to pay back their parents’ loans. Child worker was engulfed by pollution.
Child laborers have education and health facilities. Poverty, lack of nutritious food, illiteracy and overwork case them serious harm. Their work makes them suffer extreme heat, humidity, dust, dirt and smoke. They suffer from such dreadful diseases as asthma, tuberculosis and hepatitis, to name of few. Such children are forced to do all the jobs that adults do not want to do. They lose their childhood and innocent in the process. They lose about 90% of their physical strength due to lifting of heavy loads as part of their job. This has a harmful effect on the child’s body.
Children working in glass –cutting and brass industries are particularly affected by ill health. Bad health also dogs children working in mines, quarries and construction industry, which literally live in dust and dirt. In the brick kilns, children aged less than fourteen carry heavy brick loads weighing almost 10 kilos on their heads. In Kashmir, where children work in the carpet-weaving industry, tuberculosis and Asthma are common. There are no chances of their getting any medicine and nobody cares if they are injured. In the hundreds of fire works factories of Sivakasi, many children have been falling prey to accidents and burns.
Movement against child labor
There is a big movement going on to prevent children, [under any circumstance] from working in hazardous industry. Along wit, non governmental organizations and the governments are working to increase educational opportunities for such children. All across the country, efforts are being made to stop child labor and send children to school through the national child labor project.